Attica recreate Kit Williams cryptic book with offers of treasure island.

Anyone remember the old Kit William’s book Masquerade? If you’re not familiar with it the basic premise was this: Kit buried a gold necklace of a hare (worth about £10,000 allegedly) and put cryptic clues to its whereabouts in the book.

The trinket was buried well out of the reach of metal detectors and anyone who bought the book could have a go at trying to work out the clues (that’s if you could even spot the clues!) and the first person to solve all the clues would, in theory at least, know the precise whereabouts of the necklace.

And what’s this got to do with games? Attica are about to launch a game called Aureum which works along similar lines. When the game’s made available (PC CD ROM) on March 15, everyone buying a copy will be invited to solve the game’s clues which should lead them to a virtual pot of gold coins.

Eighteen months later the first 10 people to complete the game will be whisked away to a Mediterranean island where they’ll compete in another treasure hunt – this time to find a real crock of Roman gold coins worth some £20,000.

Aureum’s designed to appeal to a worldwide audience and so the puzzles it contains are primarily visual and the game uses no present day language (Latin anyone?). They are however, based around factual events and related issues of the day.

Aureum will set you back £40 on its day of release, but Future Gamer reckon the chances of winning have got to be better than the National Lottery, and we wish we could enter – conflict of interest prevents us, not that we’d find it too, er, difficult or anything…